The Invasion is a remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, a great movie, and it's worse than pointless. A pointless movie would have merely been a retread of the first film but not done as well. This picture takes an intelligent and suspenseful film and dumbs it down it down practically to the level of Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, and adds MTV editing so that the most ADD person in the audience won't get bored. I would feel sorry for Nicole Kidman, a great actress, for appearing in it, if I didn't think it was for any reason other than to cash a paycheck.
If you remember, the original Don Siegel film (which itself was based on the novella Sleep No More by Jack Finney) starred Kevin McCarthy involved a small town slowly being taken over by aliens that grew in plant pods that landed on Earth. They grew an identical version of you and replaced you when you slept. You still had all of your memories, but no emotion. I saw the movie when I was kid and it really scared me. I remember it vividly- the idea that your body would get taken away as you slept was really disturbing to say the least. A scene towards the end of the film (I won't give it away) was very tragic as well as scary.
I was not a fan of the 1978 remake, directed by Phillip Kaufman and featuring a bizarre cast including Donald Sutherland, Leonard Nimoy, and Jeff Goldblum, finding it pretentious and often unintentionally funny, but at least it had some ambition to it. Whereas Siegel's film is often interpreted as one of the few intelligent anti-Communist films made in Hollywood, Kaufman appeared to making yet another trip to the 70's "government is corrupt" paranoia well, which I had long since tired of drinking from.
I missed the 1993 remake, directed by Abel Ferrara and called simply Body Snatchers, which was not commercially successful but developed a minor cult following. The general outlines of the story were still unsettling, so I looked forward to seeing The Invasion, despite the bad reviews. I should have stayed home.
The biggest of the many, many problems with The Invasion is that it takes a story that must treated with a degree of seriousness and realism if it going to be anything but laughable and pumps it up to Michael Bay-like intensity. We get countless cheesy CGI shots as the rubber-like virus (which replaces the plant pods) enter people bloodstreams. This movie does not need special effects to be scary. It also suffers from a big problem of Kaufman's remake- it takes forever to get the story going, even though everyone in the audience is aware of what's going on. An infected person is obviously acting different, yet no one seems to catch on until it's too late. Why are people in movie's like this so stupid?
There is also a degree of implausibility. Why would the aliens take over Baltimore, Maryland instead of a small town and working there way out, as in the original? If they are going to take over a big city, wouldn't Washington, D.C. be a better choice? How exactly is this virus a self-aware being? And why are they invading anyway? There's no explanation (spoiler) as to why they want to take over another planet, as there was in the original or if they did (bigger spoiler) they would make the mistake of countless movie aliens from Signs to War of the Worlds and choose a planet where they could be so easily defeated. Finally, there is a bizarre homage to Pulp Fiction that is just unforgivable.
Nicole Kidman is excellent, of course, but big deal. This is not a movie that requires a virtuoso performance, which makes her attempts at getting a real character unnecessary. It sort of seems like she was put into the movie to give it a sense of prestige it would otherwise lack.
This is American debut for German director Oliver Hirschbiegel, who made the acclaimed movie Downfall, about the last days of Hitler and Goebells in their bunker. I don't like to accuse people of selling out, but, given the disparity between the two movies, it doesn't seem like Hirschbiegel even tried to make a good movie. Maybe he figured he could put in less work if he got paid in dollars instead of Euros.
The Invasion (2007)